B4 Chapter 31 - Aspirations Of Godhood (Patreon)

“The grinder’s production has slowed due to excessive monster attacks from runaway storms.”

Letters appeared on the thick wooden board in front of Shilman Fried, a machine that its inventor had named…

What was the name again… Shilman thought. His memory hadn’t been very good lately.

Ah, right, it was the spanboard. Funny, how a scientist was allowed to come up with a name for a device that was essentially just ether and a few runes to connect two boards across the world.

If only he’d invented a span-talk as well, Shilman thought as more letters began appearing on the board. This spanboard was connected to the surface, and the one writing to him was Crilla Songwind. A human, who was once connected to the humans’ ether hunters. The group was so weak that they could hardly be called hunters.

After Ythar’s death, it most likely wouldn’t take five years for the human race to be wiped out. No more higher powers would be suppressing the demons on the fourth level. The humans, weaklings as they were, wouldn’t be able to defend their land.

“We have received runeswords from a collector named Ellandor,” the spanboard wrote. “It seems he has obtained most of the remaining inside-carved runeswords. We have secured all of them. Progress is slow elsewhere. Ranewal’s ether hunters cannot deal with the monsters. Jinsei is forced to spend time defending.”

Shilman tapped his finger on the table. He resided in a guest room of Adalene’s palace. Like most fifth elevation hunters, he’d walked in and offered Adalene the opportunity to treat him as a guest. If she declined, he could always turn the palace into his home regardless.

He would have liked to make fun of Crilla for struggling with the storm season, but Shilman had also spent a considerable amount of time collecting Ether at Norfolm’s front lines. The city would have probably fallen if not for his help. At least, they would have had heavy casualties.

“The grinder will not be necessary,” Shilman wrote to the board himself. “Vivian Runeblessed is about to finish her project. It should be completed now.”

Letters began slowly appearing. Shilman frowned before the first sentence had come through.

“No matter what she creates, her launcher will not reach the sun. That’s just not how the world works. But I do see merit in shooting missiles far into space, far enough that gravity won’t pull the pieces back onto the surface. Ythar will not be able to return. Regardless, finishing the grinder is necessary as a backup. We aren’t in any hurry. Ythar sleeps soundly.”

The grinder. That was the device his allies on the surface were building. It was essentially a permanent trap to collect ether from Ythar as the god created it. Any time Ythar attempted to resurrect himself, the grinder would kill him again, over and over and over again. The design would work both with mechanical parts to physically hammer him flat every time he tried to form a body, and it would have a suction for ether to pull his wisps out every time he attempted to generate ether.

The design would be good as a temporary solution. Problem was, future generations could very well destroy the grinder, and Ythar would be freed. Getting rid of the god with Shilman’s permanent solution would actually kill Ythar for good.

“Who would have known we’d be born in the age of so many prodigies,” Crilla was writing. “Thomas Warren’s Son and Vivian Runeblessed are both genius inventors from the same family. And who would have thought Lucius has formed a bond with her, of all humans? The enhancement strings will break the balance of the world’s powers. Whoever controls it first will get to conquer the surface.”

Not if I have a say, Shilman thought, annoyedly staring at the board. Crilla was prone to rambling and wasting ether on the spanboards. It didn’t cost much, perhaps a thousand ether per word sent at such a long distance, but Shilman didn’t want to listen anymore.

“I’m going to check up on her now,” he wrote, and dismissed the board.

He added ether to his legs, forcing his bones straight not with joints and muscles, but entirely with the power of wisps. The movement was admittedly clunkier than he would have liked. Even after over twenty years of walking like this, he still preferred his muscles.

But muscles had a lifespan. After centuries of use, his muscles just got too painful to use. From there, it took him another fifty years of slowly adding more ether to his daily life until he walked almost entirely with ether, now at two hundred and twenty years old.

Or something along those lines. He could always calculate it from the year he was born. That year was…

What year was I born again? He couldn’t remember. It was written somewhere—that he knew for certain—but he also couldn’t recall where he’d written that information.

Well, that was concerning. Along with his muscles, his memory had also gone through a noticeable deterioration. Not that it mattered. He was not a dying, feeble man, and he would not be that in a very long time. There was no need to remember small, irrelevant details.

Adalene’s guardsmen and servants alike scurried to the sides of the walls and bowed as he passed. Only a select few of the more experienced servants bowed without a panic. Regardless, everyone treated him with respect. Or perhaps they treated him like a walking, imminent explosion.

Everyone had treated him like this ever since Shilman returned from the mountaintops of Aladhar, after channeling ether for eighty years straight. He’d started as a fourth elevation hunter, already moderately powerful, but far too weak to make any difference in the world around him.

His first ten years were spent solely on preparing for a lifetime of channeling ether. His plan was to survive a hundred years on the mountains, and that would not have been achieved if he didn’t learn to support his organs with ether. He first learned how to extend the nutritional value of a slice of bread to extend a full month. He trained his lungs and head to survive off of a single breath for a full day.

The whole ten year hurdle was utter torture on his body, but the next seventy years were much worse. He learned to make perfect use of all five thousand wisps, marking his progress as one third of the way to the fifth elevation. He kept adding in ether with ascension skills, channeling six thousand, seven thousand ether, with a process that took years for even a hundred ether to progress.

He learned how to control ether outside his body, to interact with the wisps of nature itself. He learned to treat his staff as a part of his own body. He hunted for monsters, slaying bosses to fill his core to nearly five hundred million ether.

After seventy years of that utter hell, he finally achieved his goal. To channel ten thousand perfectly controlled wisps. He’d reached the fifth elevation.

When he returned, as could be expected, everyone he knew was dead. The rivals he had hoped to beat in the first place had left the world. And Shilman knew he’d had rivals before. He just didn’t remember their names, having spent over eighty years focusing on nothing but channeling ether.

Enhancing the capabilities of the mind itself, in Shilman’s experience, was not possible. He had tried to enhance his memory for multiple years. During those years, he merely kept forgetting more. He could keep his head operating with less air, and he could negate exhaustion if he so wished, but enhancing the thoughts itself in his head was a problem he hadn’t figured out.

He still yearned to head back to the mountains to fully etherealize his body. There would be  a time when his memory got so worn out that he couldn’t remember his own name. He had to do something before then. Spirits could use memory without physical heads. Why couldn’t he?

The new smithy he’d prepared for Vivian was a long walk off in one of the barracks outside Adalene’s palace. He didn’t have to exit through the portcullis, thankfully, and he could instead take the shorter, though more convoluted, path through underground tunnels, following a servant. He could have teleported if he really wanted to, but preparing that skill was arguably even more of a pain, and it cost a lot of ether, even for short distances. As annoying as using ether for every single step was, walking was still the easiest option.

Shilman was under the palace’s moat, when he noticed something lacking. He didn’t feel a presence from the smithy anymore. The connection was lost from the wisps he’d connected to Vivian, and he couldn’t find the connection again.

Had he forgotten to apply them again after she lost consciousness? No, surely his memory wasn’t that bad.

It seemed he would be teleporting after all. He frowned, and reached for one of the three skills in his core.

During his years, Shilman had found that many skills, such as levitation, could be replicated with just good control over ether, no skill wisps required. Teleportation was not one of those. The skill burned his ether, filling up ever so slowly while eating thousands upon thousands. He lost sensation all over his body as the skill prepared him for teleportation.

Adalene’s servant watched him in confusion. He was long past giving explanations to these lesser beings.

From there, he had to estimate the distance, and to recall the exact location he wished to teleport to. For short distances, he could feel the world through its ambient ether, and choose a safe location. He floated within his consciousness, until he found the exact basement in the barrack he was looking to visit.

Oddly enough, he still felt an ethereal presence inside. Had he truly forgotten to add the tracking wisps?

His vision flickered, and he found himself one heavy door away from Vivian’s smithy. Teleporting directly inside could be risky, especially since she was inside. She could have attacked him while he was materializing, or she could have stumbled into him. Teleporting was just a pain.

With a headache already forming, Shilman opened the door to her smithy. It seemed like she was inside, after all. Today, his dream of killing a god would progress one step closer to completion.

He pushed his aura outward, hooking wisps around the handle of the door, and he pulled, almost like solidifying ether to give him a latch to pull from. He didn’t need to pull with his hands, instead using the direct pull from his core, which was much stronger than any muscles could ever be. The door opened.

He couldn’t see anything. Vivian Runeblessed usually had a slight coating of ether around her to glow in the dark. He couldn’t see anything.

The ethereal aura he felt in the room instead came from a dark figure in the corner. What in the name of ether?

A glowing greatsword crashed down on his head as a figure in pitch-black armor void-like armor revealed itself.